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Opera Under the Stars
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20231 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
1,832 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
There are few places to hear music as unlikely (yet as salutary) as Santa Fe. A short drive out of the city stands the Santa Fe Opera in the voluptuously fresh air and, at night, watched by the stars. The roof of the building's shell reaches out over some of the seats, leaving others in the open air, creating a practically perfect acoustic environment. It is amazing that such a venue exists--and has for thirty-six years--where there is no major urban center for support. Yet, every July and August people come from all over the world to the opera in Santa Fe.
There is a simple reason for this: both the quality and nature of the productions. For one thing, Santa Fe has made a specialty out of presenting little-known operas by Richard Strauss to an apparently hungry opera-going public. Where else can one find such works as Friedenstag, Intermezzo, Daphne, Die Agyptische Helena, or this past season's Die schweigsame Frau? Santa Fe does not stop with Strauss, either: It has done rarely performed Stravinsky (Persephone, Mavra), Schoenberg (Von Heute auf Morgen, Die Jakobsleiter), Cavalli (L'Egisto, L'Orione), and Korngold (Violanta). It also presents the brand-new and untried--works by Henze, Matthus, Berio, Eaton, Reimann, and Rochberg.
It does, of course, trot out the bread-and-butter repertoire of Verdi, Puccini, Bizet, and Mozart, but it does so very well, indeed, and without the resources of, say, the Metropolitan Opera. A look back at the 1991 season is a good case in point, representative of what the company does and how it does it: a spanking new, disturbing Oedipus by Wolfgang Rihm; a delightful Marriage of Figaro by another Wolfgang, Mozart; a typically unknown Strauss, Die schweigsame Frau, and a standard with brio and great vocal beauty, Puccini's La Fanciulla del West.
Tortured Outpourings
Mother Nature put on quite a show during a performance of Rihm's Oedipus. The opera, which premiered in Berlin in 1987, usually begins with a special-effect thunderbolt, but it wasn't needed on this particular night, as thunderbolts were hurled from the sky and torrents of rain fell on some unlucky opera patrons.
Many reactions to Oedipus were possible, but boredom was not one of them. Rihm--who fashioned his own libretto after Sophocles and three varying sources, including Nietzsche's Oedipus: A Dialogue of the Last Philosopher with Himself--has tried for a fresh approach to what has become the governing myth of twentieth-century
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